Contentions

The Washington Postdiscovers that Charlie Crist is toast: “One day it is 2008, and you’re a popular governor whose Republican admirers are talking you up for the veep spot on your party’s national ticket. Then, suddenly, you’ve infuriated party conservatives, what you’re being fitted for is a political coffin, and you’re deciding whether to leave the GOP and run as an independent. … Now, targeted for extinction by ‘tea party’ activists and the right wing of his party, he is behind by more than 20 points to challenger Marco Rubio.” He’s not actually targeted for “extinction” — the Republican primary voters just despise him.

The Post‘s Dan Balz discovers that the Tea Party movement is a good thing for Republicans. “The tea party movement is a reaction against Obama and the Democrats’ agenda. Sarah Palin may be trying to become the movement’s most prominent voice, but the real motivating force is the president and his policies. That’s the good news for Republicans. At a time when the establishment of the party was demoralized and divided, the tea party activists rose up in opposition to the administration, energizing a conservative movement flat on its back. That energy presents a clear and present threat to the Democrats in November.” Who knew?

Newt Gingrich discovers that Obama’s linguistic revisions (“rogue state” is out, “outliers” is in) are a dangerous thing: “‘This administration believes it can replace reality with words. And if it has the right words in the right order things will happen. … It’s almost like a medieval, philosophical argument, like alchemy, that if I can just work all these things out right, the world will transform itself to the world I want to live in.” Joe Lieberman is more succinct: “This is not honest. … Three thousand Americans were killed not by some amorphous group of violent extremists or environmental extremists or white supremacist extremists. They were violent Islamist extremists motivated and organized by the ideology preached by Osama bin Laden.”

Clark Hoyt discovers — oh my! — that the New York Times misuses and overuses anonymous sources: “Despite written ground rules to the contrary and promises by top editors to do better, The Times continues to use anonymous sources for information available elsewhere on the record. It allows unnamed people to provide quotes of marginal news value and to remain hidden with little real explanation of their motives, their reliability, or the reasons why they must be anonymous.” Almost like they have an agenda they want to push.

Bill Clinton discovers that Bob Rubin and Larry Summers messed up: “On derivatives, yeah I think they were wrong and I think I was wrong to take [their advice] because the argument on derivatives was that these things are expensive and sophisticated and only a handful of investors will buy them and they don’t need any extra protection, and any extra transparency. The money they’re putting up guarantees them transparency.” So why is Summers in Obama’s Cabinet of geniuses?